Dave Whiteland

Just the facts.

mySociety

These days I work full-time for the international team at mySociety,
a UK-based charity that makes websites and tools that empower citizens all round the world.
From a Beholder point of view, I'd say I'm currently on sabbatical from full-time artwork to do
this. But the fact is that travelling the world to meet interesting people and help them, for free, do public good is
a great job, so I'm not complaining.

Current project:
I've been working on an interactive short story with my brother-in-pens René, which we're aiming to
release here on the Beholder website in 2015 (because we didnt finish it in 2014, whoops). Takes
a long time to make beautiful things.

I’m a Computer Scientist by training — I studied and later taught at the
Comp Sci department at Royal Holloway.

Most of my life in computing has bee as a programmer (although these new-fangled days the industry term is "developer").
I tend to think in Perl for comfort-coding (not least because it seems to me there is something slightly backward about
being forced to express yourself in a language doesn’t have pronouns), but actually I've worked
professionally in Java, Python, Ruby and PHP, together with a quite a lot of Javascript. I do estoric code too:
the Fudebakudo helmet was, for the challenge of it,
crafted entirely in POV-Ray using a text editor (yes: no wireframe modeller used for that!). Going back in time,
my first full-time job was on the early HOLMES system used in UK Police incident rooms, and before that I wrote
Assembly code for a summer job. I did my algorithms coursework in ALGOL68 (on a VAX), and way before that I was
coding BASIC on a 8+32Kb UK101 in a case made of wood.

I’ve spent around six years, on and off, in Thailand. For two and a half of those years I was a volunteer at a girls’ school, where I taught art to 6-year-olds, and English to 11-year-olds.

Bike

I’m an ex-biker, and I miss it. Many, many years ago I had a trusty CX500. More recently, I was riding a Honda NT650DV. If you don’t know about bikes, you’ll think: ooh, big bike. If you know the difference between an NT and a CBR, you’ll think: Dullville.

Boat

I sometimes crew a type of sailing boat called a Drascombe. Two masts, tan sails (you care? OK: a gunter-rigged yawl with a loose-footed main) and the whole thing the size of a very large wardrobe.

The Radio Lab podcasts are often beautifully crafted and easy to enjoy,
and sometime the Moth hits a nerve.
Meanwhile, the signal to noise ratio at the TED events isn’t as good as it used to be, but the
bestones
continue to inspie.

Head Twins: pen and ink portrait by Masayo, c.2003. This detailed and carefully observed piece shows James and Dave (right)
at the start of an aikido class. Dave is taller than James. Note thoughtful placement of hair.